Interests:Postcolonial Theory and Literature, South Asian Visual and Cultural Studies

Education

Ph.D., University of Rochester, 2000

Statement

My teaching and research interests are in the areas of cinema studies, comparative media studies, postcolonial theory and feminist studies. I have particular expertise in South Asian cinema and literature. I supervise doctoral students in the areas of cinema studies, postcolonial studies, gender theory, and south asian media studies.

My recent monographConjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema examines the radical transformations that Hindi popular cinema has undergone since the 1990s - a decade associated with India's globalization.What I call "New Bollywood" is a formation both allied to and distinct from the various "new waves" that have emerged in global cinemas in the last few decades. Arguing that the couple form has served in Hindi cinema as an efficient figure for understanding how cinema and its institutions conjugate with the social world, I show how the re-figurations of the couple in New Bollywood cinema articulates with key shifts in the industrial organization, exhibition infrastructure, generic logic and social life of cinema in India. I have co-edited anthologies on the global travels of Bollywood film music and Intermedia in South Asia.

Currently, I am working on two book projects.

The first studies cinema in an intermedial domain that includes TV. Provisionally entitled, Between State and Capital: Hindi Cinema in Transition, looks at the transactions between the Hindi film industry and the state-owned television in India in the 1970s and 80s to understand the role state-sponsored television played in the emergence of New Bollywood cinema.

The second, entitled A Cinema of Friendship: Transnational Film Production and the Social Network, focuses on the decades-long collaboration of James Ivory, Ismail Merchant and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to examine how informal affiliations and affective ties create an independent, transnational production model that functions outside the state-based, neo-colonialist co-production matrix that c the cinema of newly-decolonized nations in the 1950s and 1960s.

Publications

Books and Edited Volumes:

Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Publications

Sangita Gopal’s Global Bollywood is an interdisciplinary collection describing the many roots and routs of the Bollywood song-and-dance spectacle. The essays offer a stimulating redefinition of globalization.

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